Wireless communication has become an important fixture of everyday life. Mobile telephones and wireless pagers, for example, have become nearly indispensable items. This is especially true in the business world where wireless communication permits a company to be in continuous contact with its clients. In its infancy, wireless communications initiated from locations beyond the subscriber's home market were rare, due to technical and economic limitations. However, as society became more mobile, there was an increased demand to make wireless communication initiated out of the home market network more available and less costly.
The increased demand has been met by a number of wireless providers competing to satisfy the mobile economy without dramatically increasing consumer costs. In order to maintain their share of the market, wireless providers have offered their mobile customers simplified rate schedules. For example, BellSouth's single rate plan allows wireless customers to pay a single rate, regardless of whether the call originates from the customer's home market. Other wireless providers also have eliminated or reduced additional “roaming” charges (i.e., calls made by a customer while out of the wireless provider's local network), or provided for the pre-payment of such roaming charges.
Although the wireless providers have eliminated or reduced the roaming charges to their customers, these additional fees often are offered at considerable expense to the wireless provider. This is because in order for roaming to occur, the foreign market network (i.e., the system in whose geographic area the wireless telecommunications unit has originated) must first agree to provide service to the wireless telecommunications unit. As such, the home market provider is at the mercy of the foreign market provider to complete its customer's call. As a result, roaming agreements must be entered into at great costs to the home market provider.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to provide a system and a method for allowing home market carriers to connect their customer's long distance wireless communications without incurring the foreign market carrier's additional connection fees.